UNIVERSE OF TORMENT PREVIEW

Here is the unedited first page of “A Boxing Story” from the UNIVERSE OF TORMENT print book forthcoming sometime this year.

HELL ON EARTH

Here’s the unedited first page of “Alley of Desiree,” from the HELL ON EARTH book, to be released August 2014.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Idiot”

“The thought steps in, whether one likes it or no, that death is so terrible and powerful that even He who conquered it in His miracles during life was unable to triumph over it at last. He who called to Lazarus, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ and the dead man lived– He was Himself a prey to nature and death. Nature appears to one, looking at this picture, as some huge, implacable, dumb mobster; or still better– a stranger simile– some enormous mechanical engine of modern days which has seized and crushed and swallowed up a great and invaluable Being, a Being worth nature and all her laws, worth the whole earth, which was perhaps created merely for the sake of the advent of that Being.”

Julia Gfrorer, “Palm Ash”

Great pacing from the excellent Julia Gfrorer. Her mini “Palm Ash” is the best thing I’ve read in ages.

John Cassavettes, “Faces”

Cornell Woolrich, “Night Has a Thousand Eyes”

“Each unto himself has his own world that he looks out upon, and though someone else were to stand upon the very selfsame inch of ground your feet were placed upon, guided by chalk marks, he would not see the same things you did. There would have been two different views there, not just one. Or is there any world at all, I wondered, out there before us as we look upon it; may it not be inside, behind the eyes, and out from nothing, just a blank infinite?”

Lucas Cranach the Elder, “Close of the Silver Age”

Ingmar Bergman, “Persona”

“All the anxiety we bear with us, all our thwarted dreams, the incomprehensible cruelty, our fear of extinction, the painful insight into our earthly condition have slowly eroded our hope of an other-worldly salvation. The howl of our faith and doubt against the darkness and silence is one of the most awful proofs of our abandonment and our terrified, unuttered knowledge.”

Dario Argento, “Suspiria”

Hans Holbein the Younger, “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”